Twenty-thousand grocery store workers in Puget Sound, Washington are struggling to negotiate a better contract with their employers. It is reported that 40% of these workers earn less than $10/hour and the average wage at the stores is only $13/hour. Moreover, the stores limit the number of hours that each employee can work (the average work week is only 26 hours), presumably to avoid providing health care coverage and other benefits. Workers are only given three day’s notice of their work schedule for the upcoming week, but will lose a whole day’s pay if they call in sick. But these workers are now fighting back; and they are using a thought-provoking video and message to do so.

Such stories are all too common at stores throughout the world’s most prosperous nation. These stores, with Wal-Mart being the most infamous, have tried to rationalize these conditions by pointing to the fact that many of these workers have other jobs or additional sources of income. Or they argue that their employees only seek to work at their store for a short period of time before moving to other job opportunities; or that it is primarily teenagers or retired people that work at their stores.

However, three local chapters of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)—the union which represents the Puget Sound workers—are showing that not all such employees fit the above description, and are demonstrating that such employment practices have negative effects on American families too. Their campaign points out that giving employee’s such short notice about their work schedule prevents parents from attending their child’s baseball game or a parent-teacher conference—and how employers retaliate against them if they choose to go anyway. One grocery store worker who has worked in the industry for over 30 years, in a letter to a local newspaper, notes that he and his co-workers still struggle “every day to make ends meet” and know that despite working at these stores for several years, they remain only “one health care crisis from bankruptcy.”

But perhaps most interesting is the slogan of their campaign: “Share the Success.” Not only did the UFCW note that the supermarket chains across the table earned a combined $8.3 billion in profits annually, but have created a provocative video that focuses on the disparity between the salaries of two individuals: an average worker and a supermarket chain’s CEO. In the video, one loaf of bread is said to represent an average worker’s salary and then loaves of bread are stacked and stacked and stacked until the salary of the CEO is reached. Exactly how many loaves does it take? Watch this 3-minute video to find out.

Of course, news about these skyrocketing CEO salaries is not new. And nobody is advocating that the salaries of these two individuals should be equal. However, it is quite powerful to think that these companies are happy to watch their workers go to the food bank because they can’t afford to eat lunch at the store as they willingly pay their CEOs salaries of 7 million, 8 million and 11 million dollars. It is powerful to watch the loaves pile up as these workers do not even have a single slice to put away for their child’s college tuition. The UFCW reports that while the cost of living rose 13.6% in the last five years, these workers' salaries only rose by 6% as those of the CEOs rose by 216%.

At the end of one if its television commercials, the UFCW asks the question, “Is the Middle Class Disappearing?” If a single company can pay such an astronomical salary to one person and leave tens of thousands of working families struggling to even get by, things seem to be headed in that direction.